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Author Interview

Earl Swift

Out of Nowhere

Virginian-Pilot

Author Comments on "Out of Nowhere":

I learned of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in an internet cafe in south central Thailand. I'd just emerged from a month in the Laotian jungle, where I'd been encamped with a U.S. military forensics team seeking the bones of soldiers lost in the Vietnam War.

That trip, and two earlier I'd made to Southeast Asia, had been arranged by an Army public affairs officer, then-Lt. Col. Franklin Childress. In the spring of 2002, as I finished the first draft of a book on the military's ongoing effort to find and repatriate its unaccounted-for dead, Childress called to check on my progress, and we got on the subject of 9/11.

He'd been reassigned a few months before to the Army's personnel staff. His Pentagon office had been destroyed when American Airlines Flight 77 hit the building. His boss had been killed, as had several colleagues who'd been sitting within a few feet of his own desk. Childress had survived because he was out of the building, buying a house.

News coverage of the attack had been frustrating, he told me. He'd arranged interviews of the surviving staff for dozens of reporters, who had asked all manner of questions about how his people were doing physically and psychologically, but none had asked a most obvious question: What happened?

These people want to tell their story, Childress said. They need to tell it. They just can't find anyone who wants to hear it.

My paper, The Virginian-Pilot, serves a region home to the largest military complex on the planet. It wasn't difficult to sell my bosses on an anniversary story that centered on the Pentagon, nor on using a narrative approach. In late June I drove to D.C., sat down with Childress and his coworkers, and returned with a list of 10 people who seemed to have potential as characters—men and women of varying ranks who'd witnessed the attack up close and had narrowly escaped.

I conducted multiple phone interviews with each in July, and by mid-month had narrowed my focus to five main players. I'd also, with Childress and the Navy's help, made contact with the sole surviving occupant of the Navy Command Center, which was gutted in the attack and located directly below the Army personnel office. I opened each interview by having them recount their experiences as they remembered them, then broke their narratives into their component parts and the components into still smaller units until we were dissecting that morning at an almost subatomic level. My characters shared many recollections; though they'd been scattered in the office when the plane hit, their paths intersected in the hours that followed. One of the exciting parts of reporting the story was coming to see how so many individual stories braided into a single whole. Corroboration was not a problem.

What was difficult was understanding and describing the movements of my Army characters in a large office filled with cubicles—and with the dead-ends and labyrinthine travel routes that such places present. My salvation was a blueprint prepared for a Pentagon renovation. It depicted every cubicle, every desk, every doorway and window. A colonel in the office had made a personal project of determining where every member of the staff had been standing or sitting at the moment of impact, and had marked the drawing to reflect his findings.

I supplemented his work by attaching a name to every work space in the room, so that if someone wasn't at his or her desk, I'd know it—and be able to find out why.

The blueprint was key to my understanding the choreography of survival, and to explaining it in the series.

I'd written other reconstructed narratives, one following a handful of families through a deadly rainstorm in the Virginia Blue Ridge, another as part of my MIA book: I was able to fashion, in pretty good detail, the final minutes of the helicopter crew whose bones we sought in Laos. The Pentagon series was comparatively easy, in that the action was recent, unfolded in a finite space, involved characters whose stories agreed, and relied on the recollections of witnesses who were trained to be detail-oriented, observant and level-headed. The characters thus did a lot of my job for me.

Earl Swift has written for newspapers in St. Louis, Anchorage and, since 1987, in Norfolk, where he's been a beat reporter, columnist, editor and feature writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

In 2001 he won the first national reporting prize awarded by River Teeth, a journal of nonfiction narrative, and in 2000 was a finalist for an ASNE Award in team deadline reporting on the ravages of Hurricane Floyd. His editors have nominated him five times for the Pulitzer Prize.

His book "Where They Lay" was a finalist for last year's PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. His 2001 book, "Journey on the James," won the Southern Environmental Law Center's Phillip D. Reed Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment. He was a Fulbright fellow to New Zealand in 1994.

An avid outdoorsman, Swift has backpacked the entire Appalachian Trail, canoed the 435-mile James River from beginning to end, and circumnavigated the Chesapeake Bay by kayak. He lives with his 11-year-old daughter, Saylor.